Although the demand for printing electronic documents (EDs) is decreasing because of recent improvements in computer displays, there are still those who generate hardcopies of EDs for purposes of reading the EDs. For example, some readers may simply prefer reading a hardcopy over staring at a computer screen. In other instances, hardcopies of the EDs may be provided to a group of people at an informal presentation, or in other situations where reading from a projector screen or computer display is not convenient.
An ED may specify one or more pages having a column layout. In other words, the ED may specify a text stream and/or images to be arranged in columns. The ED may dictate the columns have identical widths. Alternatively, the ED may dictate different widths for different columns. Regardless, it is the responsibility of a layout engine on a Page Rendering Device (PRD) or user machine to layout the text streams and images in the document as specified by the ED.
Accordingly, as the text stream may be of any size, as the columns may be specified with any set of dimensions, and as layout engines differ among platforms, it is unlikely that the text stream, once placed in the column format, will terminate at the height of the last column (i.e., it is unlikely the text stream will be evenly distributed among the columns of the final page) without the use of heavy time consuming processing. However, users often find it aesthetically pleasing to read from a document in which text is evenly distributed across the multiple columns and thus desire such a distribution if a column layout is present.